An Elephant Never Forgets
by Dianne
Summary: An impatient Tooth Fairy opts not to wait for teeth to fall out naturally, a jaw will do, as will tusks or horns; after all, ivory towers aren't built in a day.


"Sammy, you're gonna have to go sometime." Dean let his eyes stray from the road before him to watch his brother grip his head in pain once more. "This can't keep happening. You can't eat, you can't sleep, you're being a bitch..."

Sam Winchester eyed his brother wearily, knowing he was right but not willing to admit it for one minute. He was sick of Dean always being right. Always telling him what to do. "No, it'll go away," he insisted.

"And you thought I was wimpy because I hate to fly. Look, Sammy, dentists are the good guys. The guys in white. They save you from the evil gum disease."

"Anyone who could pull people's teeth out is not right," Sam insisted, and stop calling me Sammy."

"As soon as you admit you need to get those wisdom teeth out." Dean ducked as Sam threw the now empty tube of anbisol at him and laid the seat back to close his eyes.

"Ow!" Dean exclaimed as the tube grazed his temple.

"Put some numb-gum on it," Sam told him, turning his head to the side to face the darkness out the window.

Dean pulled up in front of a hotel. Not the usual kind they stayed at. This place was a three story deal, with a canopy car park and a real lobby with clerks who didn't have their lunch half in their mouth and half dripping down their front. Sam scowled as Dean talked to a female desk clerk with a fussy silk tie at her throat, no doubt introducing he and his room mate as Frank and Joe Hardy. And then he saw it.

i The Chagal welcomes Wisconsin's Dental Association. /i Sam was about to get out of the car and start walking but Dean was surprisingly quick checking in considering how pretty the clerk was. "A dental conference? Why are we here, Dean?"

"Because as I was trying to find a dentist for you nearest our next stop, I happened to find this place which was just a jog to the left of where I was originally going to take you and I figured, hey why not pull four teeth with one set of pliers?"

"What in the hell are you talking about?" Sam asked, grabbing his bags out of the trunk as Dean smacked the hand of a car park attendant, who was attempting to shield them from the rain with a huge golf umbrella as he reached for Dean's keys.

"No offense, it's a classic," Dean told the astonished young man who walked away shaking his head, a five dollar bill clutched in his hand. He turned to his younger brother. "Ever hear of the tooth fairy? Well, he's here."

Sam looked at Dean for an explanation but none came. He rubbed his ear, thinking he'd heard wrong, but somehow with all he and Dean had been through, he knew the chance of that was slim to none.

It was the first time in a long while that Sam and Dean had a suite with separate bedrooms. It was a nice change, a little privacy, especially for Sam. But with Dean constantly knocking on the door, it hardly made a difference. "Little brother, I have found you a dentist. She'll hack those teeth out of your head so fast you won't even know what hit you."

Sam looked up from his lap top, wide eyed. "Speaking of hitting me, I think I'd rather that than go to a dentist within five hundred miles of here. Why didn't you tell me about this tooth fairy thing before?" On his screen, the face of a being with a huge mouth full of dirty, broken teeth, yellowed slack skin and shrivelled eyes that the colour had long since become indiscernible, stared out at him. He turned the screen toward his brother who neither blanched nor looked shocked.

"I didn't want to scare you," Dean said reasonably as Sam just scowled at him, his forehead crinkling as Dean handed him a banana shake while he plunked himself into a chair and proceeded to gnaw noisily on a huge steak, cheekily offering Sam some.

Article after article from paranormal researchers and nut cases flashed on the screen with grotesque pictures and diagrams. Several dental conventions had been entirely wiped out over the past fifty years. Most cases were chalked up to legionaries disease by authorities but official coroners reports noted that many of the victims had been left toothless.

"Police chief says vanity dentistry is likely cause of missing teeth of legionaries victims, speculating that they were experimenting with cosmetic dentistry and dentures when they were infected and just never got the chance to finish the procedure." Sam read from article after article, all with different stories, some with more alleged victims than others.

"Voluntarily experimenting on each other's mouths? No way. There's enough starving actors waiting to be discovered that are a bright white smile away from lights, camera, action, but can't get a part because they look like Austin Powers, who would gladly volunteer for free bonding or caps, or even replacement. Barring that there's always stupid college kids who'll do anything for a buck." Dean gazed significantly at his brother, expecting a rise. But Sam was too engrossed in yet another article.

"Early Celtics believed that teeth are like snowflakes, no two are alike. In their version of the tooth fairy, the fairy was getting tired of trying to build i her /i palace with the tiny teeth of babes so she went on to collect adult ones by any means necessary. She'd creep from house to house until she found the ones she wanted and then she'd curse the person in one way or another. She couldn't reach in and just yank the adult teeth, they still had to come out by accident or injury. But she found a way around that. She could cause an accident, even fatal, she didn't care. As long as she got the teeth. Her palace would be built twice as fast with only the finest teeth. And the Celts explained away an entire generation of village children who never lost their baby teeth to her negligence. She was supposed to come and get those teeth. In children, they believed it was in the fairies nature to loosen them.

Dean salted his meat again thoroughly as he always did. He was never as health conscious as Sam, who was always reminding him that his junk food and beer would likely kill him faster than the hunt when he was older. Sam hated when Dean reminded him that he likely wouldn't grow old. But of course he had to joke about it. "Yeah, well, I may not grow old, but you're not going to grow wise now without your wisdom teeth." And at this statement, he opened his mouth wide, a bit of steak still in mid- chew to show Sam that he still had all his wisdom teeth.

"That just proves that you're a big mouth. And you can't make yourself so salty that you'll repel the spirits just with your breath, Dean," Sam told him. Dean put down the salt shaker.

"Enjoying your mush?" Dean said evenly. Sam did look envious of the huge plate of food Dean was quickly finishing. A new tube of anbisol flew through the air toward Sam.

"Don't say I never got you anything," Dean said, leaving Sam with the news that he'd made him an appointment with a local dentist he'd met downstairs in the restaurant for first thing in the morning. Trust Dean to already know someone local. Sam would wake before Dean and leave before he got up, missing the appointment. He'd go the library to check on old legends of the tooth fairy. Dean popped his head around the corner, assuring Sam that the dentist he'd picked was definitely i not /i the tooth fairy.

So much for separate rooms. The two brothers sat up late into the night getting whatever information the free internet hookup could provide. Hell, most of their rooms were lucky to have phone service and a private, unshared washroom, this was luxury.

They were studying early American settler's version of the tooth fairy and found out quickly that fairies were considered pagan and evil. "So that's why dad never let us put our teeth under the pillow!" Sam whistled, staring at the screen of the charcoal drawing of blood stained pillows. He shivered slightly. Life had never been normal for the Winchester boys but their father was always very careful when they were growing up to dispose of any superfluous body parts like baby teeth. And he'd panicked whenever one of his boys got a soar throat or a pain in the lower right belly. They remembered him mumbling about ritualistic appendix and tonsil usage but back then, at least to Sam, he'd stop there. Whether Dean knew more of any of this weird behaviour, he'd never told Sam.

Dean woke, expecting to hear the shower but there was silence. It was ten thirty. He'd set the clock for seven. It wasn't like Sam not to be up now. Dean gulped, getting to his feet, scratching a bit and calling for Sam. He knew it. The reason there was no reply. Sam had deliberately turned off the clock, letting him sleep in and had skipped out on his appointment. He'd rip those teeth out with string tied to a door like they'd tried when they were kids, even though they'd had no success.

Opening Sam's door, Dean was surprised to see his brother still in bed. The curtains were still drawn. "Damn it, Sam, you made us sleep in." He grabbed the end of the bed covers and pulled, a cry escaping his lips when one pillow fell to the floor, revealing bloody smears. Of ketchup.

Sam stood in the doorway of the bathroom, laughing and wincing at the same time. Dean grabbed him a headlock, rubbing his knuckles into his head.

"Okay, Okay! Mercy!" Sam caved easily this morning. When they were younger, Dean was just as likely to rub his knuckles raw and give up before Sam would give up. Dean took the tube of anbisol and flushed it down the toilet. He raised his finger, pointing it at Sam, like he was going to lecture. Like he was going to be dad again. But he didn't do it.

"It's on, Sam," is all Dean said before closing the door again a little too quietly and calmly for Sam's liking.

Sam felt like all the dentists ... and he could pick them out of the crowd, were watching him. That they knew his dirty little secret. He ordered some eggs but even chewing them was beginning to hurt. Dean sat across the table from him making faces at him, sticking his teeth out and such to look buck toothed.

"Look, Sam, the way I see it, you get those teeth out or you'll be sitting on a porch somewhere looking like the Benders, cleaning your rifles and sipping apple sauce out of a straw. Your pearly whites will be all pushed out."

"They're coming in fine. You said it yourself, your weak jaw had room for 'em, mine must, too." Sam followed the contours of Dean's jaw checking for similarities.

"Yeah, but I got dad's jaw and rugged good looks and you got mom's ..." The jab died on Dean's lips. There was silence at the table, except for Dean squirting ketchup on his breakfast sausages until a woman in a business suit with a name tag on her lapel came over and cleared her throat causing them both to look up from the plates of the food neither could taste any longer. i Carolyn S. Sibley, DDS. /i 

She placed a white slip of paper onto the table and told Dean that this was his bill for a missed appointment and asked if he would like to pay cash or credit. Now. Sam didn't realize he'd been clenching his mouth shut ever since he'd read her lapel tag. He nodded his head politely, getting to his feet to take care of the breakfast cheque. To get as far away from the i dentist /i as possible.

i Just great, /i thought Sam as he heard his brother's ' i I'm-so-sorry-do-you-think-you- could-see-your-way-clear-to-reschedule /i speech.

"She's booked up with conferences all day but she has an opening for tomorrow at one thirty. And you will be A. I. S. at one fifteen." Dean ordered.

"A I S? As in i ah, I'll sprint? /i "

"Ass in seat. Ass in seat, Sam, you know what dad used to tell us on a road trip when we'd be allowed to get out and stretch our legs and he'd give us a time to be back."

"I don't remember that," Sam said seriously. It was easy for Dean to forget that he was alone in a lot of his memories. A few years difference in age sets two people worlds apart sometimes. "But it sounds like something he'd say," he offered and Dean nodded in a non committal kind of way and got in the car. "Anyway, where are we going?" he asked as he sat down and closed the car door.

"To a rare wood dealer on Fifth Street," Dean told him.

When they pulled up to a house which was next to a garage three times the size of it, they heard the whir of saws and watched as plumes of sawdust puffed into the air. A light, spicy scent reached their nostrils and had them sniffing appreciatively before they were even parked.

"Why are we here?" Sam asked.

"This guy sells African wood and is a specialist in African folk lore, too. He still sells anti voodoo talismen and repellents for evil spirits and fairies. He also beats Ikea hands down in the most comfortable futons in the world contest. Well, that and the fact that he's listed in dad's book."

The door to the woodshop was open fully. Rays of unfiltered sawdust and sunlight stabbed down to the soft bedding of shavings on the floor. It was mesmerising mixed with the fresh scent which now hit them fully in the face as they peaked in. A very old man looked up from his lathe. He scrutinized them with deep, chocolate brown eyes set into a wrinkled dark face covered in contrasting silver gray beard and moustache. The eyes were friendly, yet wary.

The other men in the shop, all dark skinned and somewhat younger than the man at the lathe, were waved away by the old man to go take a break. As each of them shuffled past Dean and Sam, they made a mark with their finger over their hearts and turned back toward the interior to bow before exiting. Dean and Sam began to step in but were stopped when the man raised his arm, palm toward them and indicated their feet. It was then that the brothers noticed that all of the men were unshoed. Dean waited to roll his eyes until he was bent over untying his shoes and was sure no one could see it, while Sam, who had bared his feet to watch many karate tournaments when he was in school, understood the tradition at least in some part and assumed it was something culturally similar.

The old man made the bow and the mark on his chest in an exaggerated motion of instruction to them and Sam reverently tried to follow while Dean went through the motions so that he could gain entry. This did not go unnoticed.

"Believers and non believers alike will be protected," The old man offered as Dean looked properly abashed. "And in your line of work, I would think that you would have come to believe in as many Gods as you can." Now Dean was curious. He had told the old man on the phone that he and his 'partner' were furniture dealers.

"Sam and Dean, it is nice to see you. I met your father when you were a baby," the old man told Sam. It was I who made your second crib. Iron supports and African Tiger Wood. We don't get many requests for that combination. Your father told me I'd be meeting you one day." Dean gripped the book that listed this man in it, wishing his father had been more specific about the type of contact they would be meeting.

A few months ago, this information would have shocked the boys. It had become almost routine to meet up with people on their way to wherever who had had dealings with their dad. Was it that obvious? Did they give off a desperate air of someone who was searching for something in vain? Did they look i that /i much like him?

Sam cleared his throat and rubbed his temples. "When did you meet our father last?" He remembered the crib. He'd slept in it until the age of three when it became impossible to keep him contained and he merely climbed out of his protective little cacoon.

Mirambo Baja put a thick finger nail into an age ring of a sectioned log. It has been less than a year since John Winchester had stood in this very shop. Had smelled the intoxicating aroma of soaking, bent sticks of wood, destined to become things of great magical power or merely somewhere to sit after a long weary day.

Dean's eyes adjusted to the semi darkness of one corner of the shop and he saw, to his greatest astonishment, wooden teeth, some alone, on tiny toothpick sized pedestals and some in full denture replacement style. They weren't for macabre decoration. Some of them lay in open boxes, shipping labels half finished to affix to their tops.

"This is my wife, Kabato," Mirambo introduced. The woman looked younger than her husband but still ancient. She held a tray with cool lemonade in tall glasses with hollow stems. Sugar cane stems were split and hung over one side of each glass. The lemonade had no sugar in it, it was merely lemon juice it turned out. One was to sip and then suck on the sugar cane to ease the pucker. Kabato laughed as she said their father had not liked the beverage at all but that it was drank to expel sour personality tendencies before political summits between tribes or meetings about dowries between families.

"Well, make his a double, then," Sam said, nodding toward Dean and finishing his own, quickly pulling the sugar cane from the side of the glass.

"It beats a stick caning to expel evil tendancies," Kabato said reasonably and the brothers were surprised by her quick wit. But she didn't look like she was joking, despite the grin on her face which seemed to split her face into two distinct sets of wrinkles. But what was more surprising about her grin, was her teeth. In sharp contrast to her husband's brilliantly white teeth, hers were ... made of wood!

"Close your mouth, young one," Kabato said, but she did not seem offended. Sam and Dean got control over their dropped jaws quickly and sought anywhere but Kabato's mouth to fix their gaze.

The lemon juice almost completely failed on Dean as far as Sam was concerned. He was a very direct young man who did not often waste time on subjects that didn't directly link with his present enquiries. Cutting straight to the point as Sam cringed, Dean began to ask about different African ancient tribe's takes on the tooth fairy.

Some time must have passed with all the small talk because the workers had started to file into the garage once more, each removing his shoes and making the sacred sign and going straight back to work. Dean began to move around freely, without complaint from either Kabato or Mirambo. It took him seconds to remember clearly that the men had been speaking English when they'd gotten there but were now speaking only in their own tongue. But body language didn't lie and he clearly saw that some of them had gestured toward their mouths. Dean turned toward Mirambo to try to figure out how in the hell he knew what he and his brother had come to ask about.

Mirambo went to a drawer under a work table and pulled out a sheaf of drawings which were coated in sawdust. He blew them off and handed them to Dean. Some of the drawings were clearly his father's, others Mirambo said his wife had drawn for John Winchester ... from her own up close personal account and memory.

Dean stared at the different images, some grotesque individuals or spirits in long grass cloaks with extremely long, skinny, almost skeletal fingers, and one of a good looking, young muscular black man. As Dean flipped through the images, Mirambo handed Sam a piece of wood and some sandpaper wrapped around a stone and motioned for him to begin sanding. Each time Sam took his eyes of his assigned task, Mirambo would indicate for him to get back to work while Dean flipped through the images faster and faster until they seemed to move like frames in a cartoon reel. The grotesque figure in the frames morphed into the handsome young man, his green eyes staring out, almost as if they could see him.

"No one has photographed the Ganoge. For the same reasons many tribes believe that photography steals one's soul, the Ganoge is not photographed because it is said he can then travel directly through his image to the photo and that he who holds his image will die, his teeth becoming the jewels in the finishing touches of Ganoge's castle.

"Ganoge?" Sam asked, about to put down his stick of wood and sandpaper covered rock to grab his dictionary.

"Don't bother," Mirambo told him. "You will not find Ganoge in any dictionary, perhaps not even on the world wide web. He is not a well known God. Not a well loved God."

Sam heard Dean muttering different names of Gods whose names began with the letter i G /i . "Ganesh, also called Buddividhata, Veghnahara, elephant headed God, remover of obstacles ..."

As Dean went on through his list out loud from his head, Mirambo interrupted. "Oh, yes Ganesh, remover of obstacles. A well loved God. A good God. But Ganoge is not a remover of obstacles. He is a remover of life."

Sam and Dean didn't even really remember moving from the work shop to the main house where they were seated at the kitchen table as Kabato stirred a huge pot of some sort of soup. Mirambo was telling them story after story of many tribal beliefs and rituals and they were mesmerised. It was one thing to look up facts in a library or read from books from unattached authors, whose accounts of legend were nothing but second hand, exaggerated versions, another entirely to hear the stuff told by a man who seemed to have lived some of them. Kabato for her part, did not speak of her encounter with the figure in the grass cloak and she closed her mouth each time she found Dean staring into it.

"Gods, like humans, seek to impress. For a time, the size of one's palace was of the most importance. They had to be above humans, above each other. Humans built straw huts, gods built brick, humans began making brick and marble, gods made silver and gold. Humans began the guilded age, gods began to build from bone and teeth."

"So keeping up the Jones, god style," Sam whistled.

"In many parts of the world, elephants are one of the most important sources of affordable labour, transportation and entertainment. Some revere the gentle beasts, some do not. But elephants do have a God. A God above Ganoge, who is called, Loxodonta. Loxadonta is Queen and protector of elephants. Her places of worship are always dried grasses. She is said to take the form of an elephant every ten years and seek revenge upon man for his mistreatment of her herds."

The brothers exchanged glances. Their father had always told them that it was no coincidence when elephants would suddenly rampage and trample from mistreatment. He had never named Loxadonta as the source of the angry malcontent of some of the beasts but now it was even more obvious that their father had spent more time here with Kabato and Mirambo than they had let on.

Sam could have listened to the old man talk all day but Dean grew impatient. "Um, since you know that we came to find out about legends of the tooth fairy ..." It sounded stupid coming from his mouth and he knew it but he wanted to get Sam to his dentist appointment even if it meant having to come back here, and in some ways, he kind of hoped it would.

"Do not interrupt an old man in his stories," Kabato warned Dean. Mirambo for his part, had only raised his thick, greying brow, no doubt wondering how it was that Dean couldn't see that he was getting to his point, slowly.

"You have heard the saying i Do not sit in your ivory tower and look down upon me? /i " Mirambo asked, staring Dean in the eyes.

"I'm sorry, sir, please continue," Dean said as Sam smiled at the compliance that Dean usually reserved only for his late father.

"That was not an accusation, it was an enquiry." Mirambo stated.

"Ivory tower, yeah we know the saying." Dean tried not to sound impatient.

Loxadonta was mourning the loss of entire herds of elephants and orphaned elephants were roaming the plains. Loxadonta's accusing eyes fell upon man, and when she found out that they were bringing sacrifices of ivory to Ganoge, she became enraged and vengeful.

"Ganoge was visited by Loxadonta that very spring. The God had heard that Ganoge was building himself a new palace. When she arrived to find the palace and the towers made of elephant and rhino ivory, she screamed in fury. It is said that thunder was heard in the skies worldwide as herds of ghost elephants pulled Ganoge's castle and ivory towers down. All worshippers of Ganoge died that night, their teeth thrown at Ganoge's feet. Homeless and without adoring worshipers who had brought him even the teeth of baby elephants, Ganoge raged against Loxadonta who cursed him to build his new palace from the teeth of human children so that it would take millennia to complete." Now Dean and Sam were sitting straighter, like children in school whose teacher had been reading the boring parts of Shakespeare and had finally gotten around to the sword play.

"Ganoge was humiliated, but as a lesser God, unable to vindicate himself against Loxadonta. As is the wont of Gods, Loxadonta did not keep tabs on Ganoge as long as he no longer took the ivory. Loxadonta had given Ganoge the right to take human teeth, instructing him to take the teeth that children would begin to lose at the age of about five."

"As the years went by, Ganoge became impatient. The teeth were impossibly small for his lofty goals. His fingers grew longer and skeletal to reach into the mouths of babes to take the teeth. He became ugly as he had no adoring virgins praying to him any longer and obsession to rebuild engulfed his whole mind."

"So you're saying that this Ganoge, is the tooth fairy?" Dean asked impatiently.

"One of many. All who have different uses for the precious parts. Ganoge is a thief in the dark. If when he goes to take teeth, he feels he may be interrupted by a parent or another fairy or collector in competition, he will merely take the whole jaw and extract the teeth from it later. Skeletal remains found with the lower jaw missing are usually a crime of Ganoge."

"Okay, so there's lots of tooth fairies," Dean said impatiently. "Since we're not in Africa, we're probably still looking for the tu tu wearing, wand carrying bitch, right?"

"You seek Ganoge," Kabato told them flatly. She removed her wooden teeth plunking them onto the work table, her oral cavity sinking in immediately, making her look like a pruny old potato. "One night when I was a child, Ganoge visited our village, demanding sacrifice. We had hung the donkey jaws on our doors but they no longer protected us. They were no longer enough. To protect the young in our village, the elders gave us sleeping potion. When we woke up, we had no teeth. Those children who ran away to avoid the extraction were found dead in the desserts, their entire jaws missing. The government, with pressure on them from the United Nations, removed all the children from their families and the adults were imprisoned for practising false religion. Ganoge moved on."

Sam and Dean stared at one another when Kabato announced that she was ninety five years old. But they had more questions.

"With all due respect, how do you know Gangoe is here?" Dean asked. After all, this was America. They had their own nightmares to deal with.

"Ganoge is not merely a spirit. He is a god. The world is as a pebble in his hand. His fingers are long. They stretch around this patch of life we call home making misery everywhere he goes. Now your i bitch /i as you call your tooth fairy has tried to step Ganoge many time but has failed but you should have more respect. How would you look with your ridiculous small baby teeth? Or no teeth at all?" Dean's jaw dropped open as his own bad language was repeated by the ninety five year old woman. Sam put his finger under his brother's chin to shut it as Kabato nodded her approval.

Before they left, mostly convinced that they were dealing with a God that had to be destroyed, Sam placed the now smooth piece of wood and sandpaper down on a table. Mirambo handed it back to him, asking him if his teeth had hurt him while he had concentrated on his task. When Sam had realized that they had not, Mirambo raised his brows again in an 'I-told-you-so' sort of way.

Sam fidgeted nervously, shifting in his seat every few minutes and turning the radio stations, driving Dean crazy. He hated any music that could match the windshield wiper blades in a beat even if they were on full speed right now.

"Wait, wait, turn back to that," Dean commanded as a mono toned voice gave the news. He held up his hand as Sam began to argue fruitlessly. It was useless to try to listen to his own style of music in Dean's car. But this was not music to either of their ears. i " And the two elephants at the Delilah Street Zoo were both found dead this morning, tusks missing. Peta members have long petitioned all zoos to better protect the elephants, given the rash of attacks around the country at local zoos. Failing that, the San Diego Zoo announced after hearing of the latest brutal slaying, that all elephants at that location will undergo surgery to remove the tusks to hopefully prevent such an attack in future. Anyone with information about this crime is asked to call Wisconsin State Police or their local detatchment. And now for the sports update ..." /i 

Sam would miss his afternoon appointment, again. Dean bypassed the town to drive to the zoo, which was on the outskirts of town on a large parcel of land. It was closed but they could see through the metal gates. And they could hear crying.

Dean rang the bell on the side of the gate and a young man with a broom in his hand walked slowly toward them.

"We're closed," he said simply, turning to walk away while sweeping peanut shells from the paved path idly. He stopped, wiping his brow and leaning on a gum ball machine that held peanuts.

"We're from PETA," Dean called after the young man. "We're here to investigate so we can warn other zoos against similar crimes." Sam just stared at Dean as the gate swung open.

"I'm Pete, you'll want to be talking to Maggie. She was their handler. The brothers followed Pete toward the sound of crying, which became louder with each step they took toward the pachyderm exhibit.

Maggie needed no introduction. For one thing, her lapel had her name embroidered inside an elaborately sewn elephant. That and her eyes were the same colour as the baboon butts across the way as Dean so callously remarked.

Two large mounds lay side by side, covered in huge blue tarps. Already flies began their disgusting labor. Maggie took this as an affront and swatted and stepped on as many as she could.

"We're up to code," she scolded as Dean flashed an identification card at her, knowing she could no more read it than eat it at this point. "Prince and Nilo were my life. My babies. This is a secure enclosure. It wasn't even unlocked." Dean was about to open his mouth but with a warning from Sam, shut it. Sam handed Maggie a tissue.

"We're here to offer our condolences and try to prevent this from happening again at another location," Sam said gently. Maggie had turned away from the dead elephants and was now pacing as if she were stuck in the cage with them for eternity. Dean lifted the corner of the tarp. Bloody voids were all that was left of the once majestic tusks. There was very little blood, though. Dean had expected this.

The muscles in Dean's jaw jumped. The huge, majestic beast's eyes were open and they seemed to be staring straight up past him. He looked away for a minute to get his bearings. This was a lot harder than he expected. They were just animals. They weren't people. Dean cleared his throat and looked back and he couldn't help that his eyes were drawn straight back to where they had left off, to where he didn't want them to go again. Into those great big windows. He found himself stamping on a few flies now, too, angry and not willing to admit, affected by the grizzly sight.

Dean finally allowed himself to follow the sightless gaze. There on the top of the enclosure, spanning the width of eight metal bars, spaced a foot apart, were eight distinct sets of blood smears and long grip marks bored into each bar showing shiny shavings of the metal that had been etched away in ringlets from the sharpness of those fingers.

Sam could not keep Maggie's attention for very long as she continued to pace and as she turned, her head tilted upward to match Dean's. Sam looked up and within a second, he was gripping his head in pain, falling to his knees. This was the only thing that took Maggie's attention from the cage top. She called for Pete to bring a bucket as poor Sam lost the meagre contents of his stomach. It wasn't his teeth this time. He moaned in pain, rocking back and forth without feeling himself do so. Without feeling his brother's hand on his back.

i A rhinoceros wandered lazily into a small man-made lake like pool. He tossed his small ears happily and stuck his head underwater to grasp some nice plants from the bottom. He did not resurface. Bony fingers that seemed to almost vibrate with anticipation and speed, grasped the beast's horn. The eyes grew wide, the nostrils flared until they were obscured from his sight as it tried to resurface. Sam was suffocating. The beast was dying. /i 

"Sammy! Sammy!" Someone was slapping his face. A hose turned on him and he was soaked to the bone. The skies opened up to awaken him, too. The rain was almost as hard as the hose had been.

"Dean?" Sam opened his eyes, frantically asking Maggie if they had a rhino on the premises.

"We do," Maggie stammered, " but he's being guarded for the next few days by Pete after we leave. We're not leaving the zoo unattended until the psychos that murdered Prince and Nilo are caught."

It had been dark in Sam's dream. Majestic, the rhino would die tonight, bereft of his horn. Maggie seemed almost relieved of the excuse to leave the elephant enclosure. She needed something to dote on. And that was Sam at the moment. She handed him an ice pack once they were seated in a small trailer that contained her office. She poured him some water while his i partner /i went to check out the rhino. Whenever Maggie wasn't trying to comfort Sam, she fidgeted nervously with pictures on her desk, moving them around, dusting them, finally throwing the one of Prince and Nilo across the room, forgetting that Sam was there at all.

"Who would do this? For ivory? For a trophy? A hunter?" Maggie asked the air and not Sam but Sam desperately wanted to tell her that he could help stop this thing. He couldn't, though. It would sound crazy.

The door banged open and Dean walked in without knocking. "Okay, Pete has a rifle full of tranquillizer so he'll be able to apprehend anyone who comes near," Dean told Sam, while at the sam time, nodding his head in the negative emphatically the minute Maggie turned around, running her hand through her hair still asking the air why it had happened.

Even closing the car door hurt Sam's head terribly. The minute they pulled away, seeing the huge truck arrive to no doubt take Prince and Nilo for their last trip, he told Dean that they had to do something tonight.

Walking through the door of the Chagal, the brothers bumped into Dr Sibley. "Oh, you're just heading out to my office? You can follow me." Both Sam and Dean began to give their apologies and Dr Sibley left, saying that a bill would be waiting for them in their room upon their return. Sam was in such agony with his teeth now, he almost would have gone through with the scheduled extraction.

Sam told Dean everything that had been in his dream, minus the part where he was drowned. Dean had already sold himself for Sam. And he was getting soft. If he perceived a deadly danger for Sam, he'd have set out alone. They placed a call to Mirambo. There was no answer, so desperate for anything to help them kill the builder of the ivory tower, they decided to drive over to talk to Mirambo and Kabato, finding them in the workshop. The workers were gone for the day. No matter that Mirambo and Kabato could clearly see that Sam and Dean were in a desperate hurry. Both were still required to remove their shoes and make the bow before entering. Mirambo finished humming over a bent piece of tiger wood and looked up.

"You know that Ganoge thing. It's here. It doesn't just want human teeth anymore. It wants ivory tusks again to go with them in some twisted version of the decorating challenge," Dean blurted out breathlessly. How do we kill it?"

"You cannot kill a god," answered Kabato for her husband. "It is a god's affair. You are mortal. It is out of the question."

"Yeah, well if the gods would take care of it on their own, we'd be retired in Hawaii sipping booze out of pineapples but as it is ..." Dean went on. Sam hated himself for straying from the situation for just that fraction of a second even, where his mind went to where he would rather be if they could retire. If the gods would just do their damn job. If they had intervened even once to help them. He would be back at school with Jess. His dad would be alive, his mom would be alive. Dean wouldn't die in ten months. He wouldn't be utterly alone in ten months ...

"Why would Ganoge suddenly leave Africa or India where there's more elephants?" Sam asked, still rubbing his temples from time to time. Storms building outside were also beginning to take their toll on his throbbing headache. Dean absent mindedly picked up a piece of wood and sand paper and handed it to Sam.

"Because Loxadonta's eyes are more fixed where her free herds are. And because some of the game preserves in the motherland have gone back to ancient arts to ward off Ganoge, but it is a rare practitioner of ward protections who can keep a god from its prize. The government has outlawed the practitioners from charging a fee for their services but the practice continues behind closed doors. 'Tis an embarrassment to the government that these so called voodoo men can achieve what they could not. Ganoge's fingers simply grow longer to where there are unprotected prizes."

"Loxadonta cannot kill another god," Mirambo explained. "Have you not heard the thunder? Seen the rains that are not natural at this time of year? You are not as good as you father for watching the signs. She is angry. She is warning. But if gods could kill each other, there would be none left, such is it with immortals of such power that they would want to be the exclusive ruler." Sam slapped his forehead, which was punishment enough as it brought his jaw together painfully. Water had run from under those tarps, had been under their tires as they drove through the muddy gates at the zoo, had been leaking into the cheap hotel room ceilings all week before they'd checked into the Chagal.

"Yeah, well, she can't kill the bitch but we can," Dean said. Mirambo and Kabato took the boys into their kitchen where Kabato prepared a tea of cloves for Sam for his toothaches. Mirambo and Dean poured over volumes of old cloth bound books that Dean couldn't read as they weren't written in English, but he could see the pictures plainly.

In one depiction, tribesmen from long ago used spears of teeth to kill certain spirits and body hacking gods or beasts. In another drawing, the jaw bones of donkeys were displayed on doors and a hand with long spindly fingers was seen extracting the teeth from it and not coming inside the dwelling. A drawing with an elephant caused Dean to stand up quickly. It was a huge elephant from the herd of Loxadonta elephants, impaling a cloak clad figure whose fingers were still clutched around its massive tusks. Underneath the depiction, Mirambo read the passage. I An elephant from the tribe of Loxadonta impales the extractor with its tusk and removes the carcass of it with his 'donta' meaning teeth. i Dean asked what language the man had spoken and was surprised to find out that it had been Greek and not the language of his country of old.

"Sammy, I know how we can kill it," Dean announced triumphantly. "We just have to get an elephant to scewer it onto its tusks." Dean knew how stupid that sounded the minute he had said it. Going out to the car, the boys threw weapons to each side of the trunk, looking for Dean's Colt 1911. It was an old gun. There was nothing they could do about it. They hadn't taken the ivory.

Sam couldn't believe that after rummaging in the trunk, Dean only remembered now that he'd lent the Colt to Bobby while the Impala had been laid up. He looked at Dean who was giving himself an air headdesk. Dean looked flustered. He hated forgetting things. But a lot of what happened while the Impala had surgery at the junk lot was a blur that he'd only admitted to once.

Dean picked up Sam's Taurus, examining it for a minute before throwing it down, causing a metallic clang.

"It's mother of pearl," Sam remembered, slamming the trunk closed just as Dean's fingers cleared it.

"I got it!" shouted Dean, getting into the car. He raced back to the Chagal. When Dean and Sam entered the hotel this time, they did not go by whatever name Dean had given the desk clerk. They both wore white coveralls they had borrowed from Mirambo and carried a long box of tools. They had painter's hats perched over their eyes as they approached the beached whale of a piano that stood majestically in the grand lobby parlour. Opening the lid, Dean knew he had hit pay dirt. Tickling the ivories in this establishment meant blood on the hands. This was the real deal. Ivory.

"What are you doing?" asked a bossy desk clerk, striding over. "We just had those keys replaced by an antique dealer and it took us two years to find government cleared antique ivory," she snipped.

"You were robbed, Amy," Dean stood up smiling, thankful that he had not met Amy in his other persona before. "Our boss sent us over right away once he found out you'd been sold plastic and mother of pearl keys when you'd paid for ivory." He steered Amy over to the overly clean windows and held up one of the keys, doing what he did best as Sam extracted the piano keys.

"You see, right there, as the sun hits it, it bends the light in just such a way?" Dean turned the ivory around in his fingers, sounding very knowledgeable. Clearly, Amy didn't want to sound stupid, so she agreed right away that, no, these keys were clearly not ivory but a fake and anyone who had taken a proper look should have been able to see that. Dean breathed a sigh of relief. People always wanted to sound smart.

Amy cleared her throat before Sam and Dean left and Dean was made to fill out a paper to declare when the 'real' ivory keys would be replaced free of charge with an apology from his boss and a year of free tuning and piano wire and polish.

Sam took out his knife and began sharpening the tips of the piano keys. The ivory was as easy to carve as soapstone and by the time they reached the zoo, he had six keys fashioned into blades and secured to broom handles that they had pilfered from the janitorial room at the Chagal on their way out when Amy went to yell at the florist for delivering wilted blooms, all the while muttering about being ripped off.

Sam and Dean climbed over the gate and found Pete, clearly creeped out at being at the zoo alone at night after what had happened. Pete was twitchy. He fell off the chair when a stick of celery one of the animals had rejected snapped under Sam's foot. Sam and Dean held their breath. This was not going to be easy.

"Pete," Dean called without warning Sam. Pete had been only half way up out of his chair when he called out to ask who was there. It didn't matter at all what Dean or Sam said. It all came out at once. Two different stories. Pete aimed the tranquillizer gun at them, or what he thought was the direction of their voice. They ducked easily and hid in the shadows. Dean grabbed Pete from behind but the smallish guy put up one hell of a struggle and there was no time to calm him down and explain that they were there to help. Sam grabbed the gun, thinking they would tie Pete up but Dean with his no nonsense ways, took it from him and aimed the tranquillizer at Pete and pulled the trigger with a 'sleep tight' on his lips as he dragged him into a corner and deposited him onto the floor.

The brothers settled in to wait, their breath showing slightly in the cool damp for a time, and then the temperature would change suddenly and they found themselves pulling their shirts away from their chests as a sticky heat would cause sweat. After an hour, it became painfully obvious why Pete was so twitchy. The brothers found themselves jumping with every roar of the tigers or call of the nocturnal animals. For as much as they'd faced, the power of the jungle sound was inside them, not just around them. It began to rain again. They had packed no rain gear. The air was hot, the rain was cold and coming down in torrents, obliterating the old painted footprints that guided visitors around the zoo, the helpless creatures that couldn't even find their way in the concrete jungle in broad daylight. Sam could feel the need to escape from every cage. But there was contentment, too. Full bellies, soft beds. And fear.

The rhino could see it. Could smell it. The boys could not but they could see the painted footsteps obliterate as something took human like stride through the deep accumulation of water on the pavement that tried to find its way to a sewer. The rhino was used to interruption. He was aggravated, sure but he could always get away from them. The humans. He just had to do what he always had. Go into the nice quiet darkness of his water hole. They couldn't see him there much and became bored and left usually. But not tonight.

Sam could barely breathe for anticipation. He'd seen it already. The rhino ducked to grab the plant. There was a splash on the other side of the water hole. Dean let fly one ivory spear and missed as he stood in frustration on the cement side of the pool, his shoes slipping on the slight slime of neglect. Sam screamed as the rhino let out a cry as its massive head surfaced for a second and was clearly pulled back under. The plant it had so lovingly plucked from the bottom gurgled up to the surface, air pockets clinging to its stem.

Sam plunged into the water right before Dean and together they aimed. Sam felt the spear plunge into something and heard snapping, as if bones were breaking. It was dark. He knew. He hoped at least ... Had he done it? Or had they just killed the rhino? Surely the rhino's hide would have been thicker, tougher?

A tall form broke the surface of the water, its gaunt features having soaked up water already. Blood swirled in the dark water as the thunder clapped and the tiny light Pete had been reading by before Dean had given him a heavy handed bedtime story, flickered off. They could not see the rhino. Hot down spouts of wind and water that towered in black and grey, angry plumes, threatened to push Sam and Dean under and they hung tight to each other, trying to make it back to the edge as if swimming to shore after a ship wreck during a hurricane.

Pete stirred and stood up, wobbly. They could hear him yelling. His eyes were wide as he aimed the gun that Dean had left beside him. He shot at the figure in the water. But Sam still went down. Dean took as much of a breath as he could get with the rain nearly as thick as the air and plunged after his brother who had sunk to the bottom. His fingers groped the bottom blindly, coming up with what he thought was hair but turned out to be stringy plants ... Ganoge's robes of grass. He yelled into the dark for Pete to help him but Pete continued to fire his gun, this time at something that was charging the enclosure.

Dean dived again, lightening streaks illuminating the entire sky and pool. In a horrific flash he saw Sam, desperately trying to reach the surface but he might as well have been wearing concrete shoes. The lightening stopped for a minute, making it, if possible, darker than it had been before. Dean couldn't find his brother. Muscles screaming as every ounce of oxygen left them, Dean's mind fought to ignore his body. Sam had been reaching for him. It couldn't end like this. He'd already paid for his brother's life ... It had not occurred to him at the time that one can only buy one life with one exchange and there were no warranties on a soul.

As a chunk of debris rained down next to Dean, breaking his resolve not to breathe in water to his starved lungs, he bumped into something. It was cold. It wasn't moving. Feeling blood vessels breaking in his own eyes, Dean grabbed Sam's belt and kicked hard for the surface but something stopped him. He tried to shake away the encompassing darkness, not letting go of Sam. He would never let go. An eternity had passed since he'd plunged in after Sam. Whatever was going on at the surface could be no worse than the fate that awaited them if they didn't surface now.

Pain exploded in Dean's chest as he broke the surface, Sam's limp form under his arm. His hands shook as he used the last ounce of strength he had saved for this moment to shove his brother up onto the platform. It was hardly better than being in the pool. The water from the rain had accumulated in deep puddles in muddy holes where the rhino had made a track as he did his daily pacing of the enclosure.

Dean thought the pounding and vibration was in his head as he slapped Sam's face and fought his weakness to turn him onto his side. But then he saw them. Huge forms, thundering overhead in time to flashes of lightening, splashing the puddles back up to rain down over again. Hundreds of them, drumming in his ears, pounding in his brain. Dean leaned over his brother protectively as the rain insultingly tried to fill his brother's mouth and finish what the pool had begun. The water blurred his vision. It was like watching a movie through ice.

The massive forms thundered across the pool but did not sink despite their size. One after the other tossed Ganoge above their great heads, the two spears that Dean and Sam had thrown had made their mark after all, and were still embedded in him, cutting deeper with every jolt. Loxadonta was here somewhere. She wasn't allowed to kill him. They had done it. The ancient ones. All of them who had suffered, with Sam and Dean.

Ganoge's eyes imploded with one last look of fury and fear and his body, for a second, became that of the young handsome man from the drawings at Mirambo and Kabato's house, then it scattered and wept down with the rain, some of it becoming one with the slimy pool, some finding its way to the sewers. The two spears that had been embedded in Ganoge's body hovered above the pool for a moment, the two white tips turned down and aimed at Sam and Dean.

Dean tried to haul Sam to safety behind a feeding trough. He was too weak. The spears shook as Dean leaned over his brother with his own body waiting to be impaled. He squinted as he watched the spears swivel like a compass hand, finding Pete, who dropped his gun and raised his arms into the air. Again the ivory tipped spears shook in the air, a humming sound vibrating down their long shafts. Another flash of lightening followed by a sound of something shattering split the air and the spear tips exploded. They were broom handles again, sinking to the bottom into the inky blackness innocently.

The rain still came down, though gently now. The wind whispered through it as though speaking words to calm the storm. Pete finally found his legs and made his way to Dean and Sam. Dean had managed to get Sam on his side to hit him between his shoulder blades. Water poured from his nostrils and mouth but nothing replaced it. Pete called for an ambulance while Dean bent over his brother to try to resuscitate him. Dean yelled and pleaded with Sam not to leave him. As soon as he tilted Sam's head back and pinched his nostrils, a hand grabbed his wrist and slapped it away.

"No Baywatch moments," Sam gasped out before a coughing fit overcame him and he rolled onto his side to throw up more water.

When Sam finally opened his eyes for a moment as sirens approached his soaked brother wiped water from his face. From his eyes, too. Pete was about to run to open the gates for the ambulance but he was stopped. He turned as he heard the door of the ambulance open and someone called for bolt cutters. The rumbling had started again. The ground shook beneath them. Sam could only turn his head, his vision cloudy from the tranquillizer and his near drowning. Dean's grip on his shoulder which had become uncomfortably tight was momentarily forgotten as they watched the herd that now crossed their path, unhindered by fences or any physical barriers as they walked right through them. Yet the rain seemed to touch them.

There were hundreds of them, trunks clasped, little elephants holding tight to their parent's tails and in the rear, two more. Different than the rest. Opaque like all of them, but more visible somehow. More real. They seemed to follow, bewildered. When they were far away, the rain cleared from their bodies and they shimmered with all the colors of an after storm rainbow. Tusks grew from the clear forms and a trumpeting was heard. The last water to clear from the beasts was from their eyes. Sam and Dean cleared the water from their eyes, too. It had been a hard rain. Sam's eyes closed, and he slept.

... An elephant never forgets.

And neither does Sam. He stirred uncomfortably, calling after the herd. The white flashes of lightning had become a still, bright, constant and the pressure on his head lessened. He opened his eyes, a room coming into blurry focus, a popping sound greeting him. Sam tried to speak but his mouth felt like it was full of cotton. It was full of cotton!

"U itch, mngonna gt u ack or dis," Sam drooled as Dean put down a magazine he'd been reading. It was done. Sam's wisdom teeth were out. His big brother had followed his dad's instructions to the letter and properly crushed and burned them so they would be of no nefarious use to evil beings.

A young male doctor came into the recovery room where Sam had slept off his tranquillizer and Sam looked at his big brother for explanation as to why he hadn't charmed the lovely Dr Sibley into performing the tooth extraction. As the doctor took Sam's pulse before he could be released into Dean's care with an ample supply of pain medication that he wouldn't take, Dean leaned down and gave his brother an earful.

"Well, you know how I told you that Dr Sibley definitely wasn't the tooth fairy? Well, I made a mistake. Lots of er ... developers around these here parts when a dentist convention comes to town, you know? Anyway, I owe a local kid a hundred bucks to keep quiet. I wasted the bitch in his room and the only thing he was worried about was not getting his tooth money. Kids today."

Sam closed his eyes. Dean had come through again. It had been hard growing up with two fathers. Hell, it had been hard growing up.

In a couple of days, Sam was feeling somewhat better. If Jess had looked after him, his first meal after his mouth healed would have been his favourite homemade chocolate chip cookies. Not restaurant soup. He wasn't a baby. But Jess would have made him feel better. She would have made him take his meds. Now, he felt like he didn't deserve freedom from pain. He hadn't saved her.

Dean returned to their room at the Chagal with an armload of supplies. He tossed a package of chocolate chip cookies to Sam and set a glass jar of soup on the counter, getting two bowls and spoons out. It wasn't restaurant soup. It was some of Kabato's homemade variety. Sam was lying on the sofa, his long legs awkwardly hanging over the edge as Dean drew out yet another item.

As the soup nuked to warm perfection, Dean inserted a dvd into the machine and turned on the television. The musical opening theme to the Thundercats cartoon blared out. Sam had always liked that show when he was sick or hurt as a kid. Dean had always hated it. Chocolate chip cookies weren't his favourite, either. It hadn't been easy growing up being the man of the house in his father's sometimes extended absences, but Dean had done the best he could. There was so much that Sam had been shielded from but Dean was glad of it.

"Thanks," Sam murmured. Dean balled up a napkin and threw it at him. They ate the soup in silence, Dean handing Sam a pain tablet, Sam taking it without complaint. Elephants never forget. And neither does Dean.


End file.
